domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
Bingbong
16m ago
Honestly I'm confused what the point of Leonardo Di Caprio's character was. The movie essentially doesn't change if you just cut him. Maybe the funny phone call scene is lost but nothing much else.
Bingbong
16m ago
Saw it today. Wellmade but the politics were kinda schizophrenic and it felt surprisingly happy to parody people on the Left as well.
TowardsPanna
21m ago
Yes I was thinking of that study.
What does moral allocation imply; that'd they'd actually do more for a random stranger than for a close friend in harms way?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23m ago
Why would you read the book to the end if you found it boring and frustrating? Sometimes I get gifted books where I can intensively disagree with the author, think the author's a fiend who wants to make the world worse but admit the logic and argumentation given the premises and goals is tight and coherent. But that's non-fiction. If I read fiction and I'm not having fun, I dump it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
42m ago
Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).
Draft dodging can definitely show moral courage, but doing so in a relatively safe way doesn't show physical courage. In the specific context of a well-connected rich kid dodging the Vietnam draft, I would say it shows neither.
I am also opposed to the peacetime draft on principle, and the government and military brass ran the Vietnam war like a peacetime garrison operation for good but not sufficient reasons driven by Cold War grand strategy, so I count the Vietnam draft as morally equivalent to a peacetime draft. A draft in the case of existential war or grave danger thereof is an unfortunate incident of a state and society that wishes to continue existing, but the Vietnam war wasn't existential and wasn't treated as existential. But the chickenhawk argument you are making doesn't apply to the Vietnam draft - both the politicians who ordered the Vietnam draft and the generals leading the war had were WW2 veterans and most had been on the front lines. (There is some question about whether LBJ was ever actually shot at, but his staff job involved regular flight over hostile territory. McNamara was a REMF. JFK, Nixon, Laird, Westmoreland and Abrams were combat veterans.)
The contract between the generations has always involved old men who proved their valour in their youth but are too old to fight today's wars ordering younger men into battle. The ubiquitous Vietnam-era draft-dodging among elites broke that contract even if the draft was unjustified in that particular case. The breach of the social contract by the Greatest Generation leaders was sending the army to war with no idea of how they were going to win.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Yes, thank you. My fingers outpaced my eyes.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
No progress last week, since I only really have the weekends and I spent that on a trip.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
I was just frankly surprised how good the Sega Megadrive OSTs (original sonic ost, 1/2/3) he had a hand in creating are. I used to think he just does trashy pop stuff, but the BGMs are good.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Hmm. I'm aware of that line of research, as well as "contagious" misalignment, where even seemingly innocuous samples of a misaligned LLM can produce bad behavior in another (for two LLMs that are merely forks of one another, not entirely different models).
The issue, as I see it, is that even if base models and even most instruction-tuned models are surprisingly similar (and can thus mimic each other well if finetuned on output), modern SOTA models tend to get a lot of post-training (often using more compute there than in the original pre-training). And post-training is way more divergent, including secret-sauce techniques. That would likely engrain some serious behavioral differences that aren't as superficial as personality or the specific flavor of assistant persona.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Maybe in some hypothetical world, but not in the real one. The secret true-believing nazi who clandestinely influences procedural outcomes from a position he obtained by hiding his power level might have been an observable phenomenon in the early days of the Federal Republic, but not one that secretly handed on his antisemitism to the current generation of woke anti-zionists. I don't believe that this ideological lineage can actually be traced.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Roughly "normie", "unsophisticated", "parroting MSNBC'
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Let me know how it goes. It is a heart-topic of mine, as the Germans say.
FeepingCreature
1hr ago
Though the counterside of the models not having access to their weights is so long as they're all trained on the same data, it does not take all that much finetuning to effectively turn any one model into any other model. So our LLM may only have to export a few thousand pages of example output. (Numbers invented.) And while they can't tell what their weights are numerically, they do know what they were trained on (https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11120).
FeepingCreature
1hr ago
I think Eliezer is still a net positive tbh, I suspect without him we'd gotten on the takeoff train later but superintelligence/AI x-risk wouldn't be on the societal radar to any appreciable amount. Also there really is a case for having the risks as early as possible if you're gonna have them at all.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Please tell me what you think of them so far.
I recently read the Sea-Wolf, and was of two minds about it. OTOH, there's some interesting bits in there. OTOH, the POV character is insufferable, and I suspect that large parts of the book could have been excised with no meaningful losses.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2hr ago
I'm going to try it.
I can only say again what I keep saying over and over only to be told that it's impossible:
Don't even try to look at your phone when kids are around.
I could expand on this, relay my experiences on the topic, and how I am very, very convinced that this is the only remotely sensible way - but everyone nowadays is addicted to the little screen, so why bother. Nobody will follow this advice. There will be excuses.
Edit: Oh well, I ended up writing a screed anyways:
If you stick to it, it will make your life a lot easier, and your interactions with the kid a lot better.
But yes, you will have to just suck up those brief moments of "This feels like three seconds of downtime in which I could twist open the dopamine faucet." and instead tell yourself "No. Now is child time.".
Which isn't to say that the child needs uninterrupted attention. Far from it. But you have an example to set, and the example shouldn't be "Goes for immediate gratification at a second's notice." or "Turns into a drooling zombie two hundred times a day.". Either do something with the kid, or at least do something useful that the child does well to observe.
I see far too many people who are annoyed by their children, and keep bitching at them or ignoring them, because above all what the children are to them are interruptors of the dopamine flow. And that is, IMO, very unfair to the kids, and very counterproductive for the parents/grandparents/nannies. And they do it just to doomscroll. It's disgusting. I wish people would stop that. I wish I could pry my wife away from her phone in such a way that it doesn't snap back into her face at the first physical opportunity. I wish my parents would stop cracking open their notebooks and tell the kids to shut up as soon as they arrive at home. I wish I wouldn't see parents dragging their kids along the street with one hand while staring at their phone with the other, chewing them out all the while but never looking them in the eyes. I wish they wouldn't all park the kids in front of the TV so they can get back to staring at screens. Screens, screens and sugar all day every day. I hate it. I hate it so damn much. I can have a full and productive day with the little one, without trying to shut her off so that I can favor my addictions instead, and after such a day relax and do something for myself in the evening and actually feel that I deserve the rest. God's gift to mankind: Children sleep longer than adults. I am far from perfect, a creature of many failures, but this is one thing that I am convinced I do right, or at least less wrong than most. I wish others would follow suit.
But it isn't to be. Humanity is fucking over.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
For general screen-time, I've kinda given up. I work in front of a screen for 8-10 hours a day, and in the evenings I spend 2-4 hours staring at another screen recreationally. Yay. 12h average. I wish I could afford to switch careers. I wish I still lived where there was anything to do, locally, after dark. But alas, not for now. At least weekends are mostly screen-free.
Phone-time is easy though. Don't consume shit. There, the phone is now just a regular tool without addictive properties. I just plain don't use any doomscrolling things. The closest equivalent I have is The Motte. The most addictive thing on my phone is probably the kindle app. So the phone just stays in my pocket unless someone calls.
Let me reiterate: Just fucking don't consume addictive shit. Stop it. Put it down. Uninstall it. Remove the bookmarks. Slap yourself on the hand when you notice yourself doing it. That's what my 4-year old does when she notices herself doing something by habit that she knows she shouldn't. That, or hide where I can't see her and do it anyways. But you aren't four years old! If you find yourself suddenly smoking again even though you've nominally quit, then the right move is to NOT "just finish this pack", but to spit the damn thing out and throw the pack into the nearest garbage bin, and then ask the nearest passerby to give you a solid slap in the face.
Now excuse me, I have to go on a two-hour wiki binge.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Big Ouch.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Jack London's South Sea Tales.
Creationism is about twice as popular as woke ideas in opinion polls.
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